Porus, Alexander & Punjab's Identity Crisis | Salman Rashid x Jugnu Mohsin Ep #1

ELI5 / TLDR

Salman Rashid is a Pakistani travel writer who has spent his life walking Punjab end to end and reading the primary sources on it. In this Punjabi-language conversation with Jugnu Mohsin, he runs through the timeline of his soil — pre-human Soan valley, Mehrgarh farming, Harappa, the Aryan trickle-in (not invasion), the Vedas being composed on Punjabi rivers, Taxila, Alexander’s eleven-month detour, Porus’s stand at the Jhelum, and the long Hindu Shahi resistance to Mahmud of Ghazni. The argument underneath it all: Pakistani Punjabis have been talked into worshipping every conqueror who passed through — Sikandar, Mahmud, Abdali — and forgetting the locals who actually fought them. The identity crisis is that the people who live on this land treat the land’s own kings as embarrassing.

The Full Story

Walking the timeline backwards from where they sit

Rashid opens with an old haveli in his ancestral village — three hundred years old, sitting on a mound. Mounds in Punjab, he says, are almost always old cities buried under newer ones. From there he zooms out to the deepest layer he can reach: Soan valley, near Rawalpindi, where stone-tool sites date back roughly seven hundred thousand years. Then Sanghao Cave near Mardan. Then Mehrgarh in Balochistan — about ten thousand years old, the moment when farming started and people stopped chasing animals. He doesn’t dwell on lost-civilisation mysticism. He dwells on the fact that Yar Mohammad Rind drove a bulldozer over Mehrgarh during a feud with Aslam Raisani.

“Itni vaḍḍī criminal activity hai. Tareekh de naal bhakheṛ koi nahin ho sakda.”

Farming, he adds in passing, was invented by women.

Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, and the Aryan question

Harappa sits on the Rawi, Mohenjo-daro on the Indus. They were trading with Sumer — there are Sargonic-era cuneiform tablets describing “Meluhhan ships” tied up at Mesopotamian docks. Rashid’s view on what wrecked Harappa is unromantic. It wasn’t burnt down by invading Aryans. The Rawi shifted course. Floods finished the job. The Aryans did come — but slowly, in waves, over fifteen hundred years, drifting down from southern Russia and Kazakhstan after climate shifted.

He cites David Reich (Harvard geneticist, Who We Are and How We Got Here) as the cleanest available source: Y-chromosome data shows North Indian paternal lineage is largely Pontic Steppe; mitochondrial DNA traces back to local women. Translation: the Aryan men came in, married local women, and the locals’ worldview survived through the mothers. That, Rashid thinks, is why the seal at Mohenjo-daro shows a deity sitting in what looks unmistakably like Shiva’s posture, with a peepal and tigers — local imagery that the incoming culture absorbed rather than erased.

“DNA doesn’t lie.”

He swats away the RSS counter-theory that Aryans were native and somehow exported themselves to Europe. Ego, he calls it.

Sapta Sindhu — the seven rivers, and the Vedas written on them

In the Aryan period the region was called Sapta Sindhu: the Indus plus six others. Jhelum was Vitasta. Chenab was Asikni (later Chandrabhaga in the Mahabharata). Ravi was Iravati. Beas was Vipas — a word that survives today in the Punjabi village name “Veaseta” near Depalpur. Sutlej. And a seventh dried-up river, Ghaggar, which some call Saraswati. The Rig Veda, he reminds us, was composed on the banks of these rivers. Not Delhi’s. Not Varanasi’s. The foundational text of Hinduism is a Punjabi document.

“Ke deep ke kuch laalā aur gulme aaj te saanu pata hī kakh nahin hai.”

A Ghalib line, dropped sideways: there was a poet called Daud whose city stood here, and we don’t know a thing about him now.

The Aryan religion, Rashid says, was inclusive. No hard caste lines. The Brahminical order — varna hardening into a top-down hierarchy — came later. When Alexander arrived in 326 BCE, his general Nearchus reported that Taxila had three religions living side by side without trouble: Hindus, Buddhists, and a third group (probably Jains) who left their dead exposed. No religious wars.

Taxila, before the bulldozer of Sikandar

Taxila — Takshashila — was a residential university with hostels. People came from across the subcontinent to study. Panini, who wrote the first Sanskrit grammar, studied there. So did Charaka the physician, Jivaka the eye doctor who once treated the Buddha, and Chanakya/Kautilya, author of the Arthashastra. Nearchus’s report on the city, transcribed by Arrian, says Taxilan merchants did business without contracts or witnesses — there was no legal record-keeping for fraud cases, because there wasn’t fraud worth recording. People didn’t lock their doors.

“Ḍār bhī koi nahin sī, khauf bhī koi nahin sī.”

Rashid’s barb: Chanakya was around when Florence’s Machiavelli — and the rest of Europe — was a small city-state. We had a political philosopher; they didn’t yet. Then the textbook skips the gap and we end up calling Sikandar “Sikandar-e-Azam” while Porus gets nothing.

Alexander, Ambhi, and the night attack on Porus

The most reliable account of Alexander’s eleven-month Indian campaign comes from Arrian, working from Aristotle-era letters. Ambhi, the king of Taxila, switched to Alexander’s side without a fight — fearful, opportunistic. The wider story is that Alexander sweet-talked Ambhi, then sent him to Porus with the message come kneel. Porus — king of the Chenab-Jhelum doab — replied: tell him to stop hiding behind you and meet me with his weapons.

The Battle of the Hydaspes was won by stealth. Parmenio, Alexander’s veteran general, had once said before another battle, “If I were Alexander, I would attack at night.” Alexander replied, “And if I were Parmenio, so would I.” But against Porus he did exactly that. He crossed the river at night, in storm weather, surrounded the Indian camp at dawn.

“He stole his victory from Puru.”

Porus’s son was killed early. Porus himself fought from his elephant, raining arrows on the Greeks, until the right shoulder of his armour was soaked in blood and his unit was shredded by Greek archers shooting into the elephants. The elephants panicked, turned, and trampled their own infantry.

Brought before Alexander, asked how he wanted to be treated, Porus said: like a king ought to be treated by another king. Alexander, Rashid says, was floored.

“Asī Porus nu apna veer, apna hero mannte hī nahin. Asī Sikandar nu poojde haan.”

Pakistanis name their sons Sikandar. Nobody names a son Porus.

The Multanis, the wound, and the limp out

Alexander pushed south. At Multan, citizens shut the gates and fought him hand to hand. He scaled a wall. A Multani arrow caught him under the ribs. The Greeks panicked, sacked the city, and dragged their wounded king out. Three years later, in Babylon, that wound killed him. Rashid’s reading: the Multanis — not the Macedonian phalanx — wrote the last sentence on Alexander’s life.

“Saari duniya da fateh, unu Punjabiyan maar paaya.”

Mauryas, Ashoka, and a Buddhist Punjab

Twenty-odd years after Alexander left, Chandragupta Maurya’s grandson Ashoka ran an empire that reached from Patna to Bamiyan, Parwan, Gandhara, Kabul, Kandahar — the only piece of the subcontinent he didn’t hold was peninsular South India. Punjab under Ashoka was Buddhist. Taxila a Buddhist university. The Gandhara school — Buddha statues with Greek drapery, the world heritage stuff — was ours. Kanishka, the Kushan emperor a few centuries later, was the man who pushed Buddhism out of India for the first time, sending monks east. Cultural florescence was a Punjab thing.

The Hindu Shahis — the kings nobody tells children about

Then a leap to 730 AD. The Hindu Shahi dynasty rules Kashmir, modern UP, Haryana, Punjab, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. Multan alone is outside their grip. Big kings, smooth dynastic transitions. They built the temples in the Salt Range that still stand. Around 1000 AD comes Mahmud of Ghazni, raiding seventeen times. Jaipal, then Anandpal, then Bhimpal — three generations of Shahi kings — fought him at Bagh Wali, beneath Nandana fort. Jaipal lost a battle, and rather than be paraded, immolated himself in the manner of Johar.

“Aapne aap nu jalaaya saare. Johar keeta. Kyunki Jaipal bada azeem aadmi sī.”

These were the men who actually defended this land. Pakistani Punjabis, says Rashid, name nothing after them. The hero is Mahmud — the man who came to loot temples and sell women.

“Saaḍa hero Mahmud Ghaznavi hai.”

The word that survives in Punjabi grief

A linguistic detail he can’t let go of. When Punjabis today wail in distress they shout dhāḍī, dhāḍī, hāl, hāl. He had asked Dr. Saeed Bhutta at Government College, Lahore, where the word came from. Bhutta said: when invaders descended from the passes — Mahmud, Abdali, all of them — the dust their cavalry kicked up looked like a black beard rising on the horizon. Beard in Punjabi is dāḍhī. The villagers would shout dhāḍī aaye, dhāḍī aaye — the beards are coming, the beards are coming. A thousand years later the villagers still shout it without knowing why.

“Aaj bhi log kurlānde ne — dhāḍī aye, hāl hāl. Te uhna nu pata bhī nahin.”

The thesis under all of it

Punjab — Pakistani Punjab specifically, but it lands on Indian Punjab too — has been schooled to identify with whoever was passing through with weapons rather than whoever was already here. Sikandar over Porus. Mahmud over Jaipal. Urdu over Punjabi. English over Urdu. The mother tongue is treated as the language of farmers. The history is treated as someone else’s. The pre-Islamic past — Buddhist, Shahi, Vedic, Indus — is filed as not really ours.

Rashid is not building a Hindu-revivalist case. He’s building an antiquarian’s case: there is a documented, datable, layered civilisation under your feet, and someone has decided to tell you that history began in 712 AD.

Key Takeaways

Soan Valley (near Rawalpindi) — stone-tool sites ~700,000 years old. Earliest layer of human Punjab. Sanghao Cave (Mardan) similar. Mehrgarh (Balochistan) — farming begins ~10,000 years ago. Bulldozed during a tribal feud by Yar Mohammad Rind.
Harappa ended because the Ravi changed course; not because of Aryan invasion. Indus cities traded with Sumer — cuneiform tablets mention “Meluhhan ships” docked in Mesopotamia.
Aryan arrival was a slow drift over ~1500 years from southern Russia/Kazakhstan, not an invasion. David Reich’s Harvard genetics work: Y-chromosomes Pontic Steppe, mitochondrial DNA local. Local women’s worldview survived in religion.
Sapta Sindhu = seven rivers. Indus, Jhelum (Vitasta), Chenab (Asikni → Chandrabhaga), Ravi (Iravati), Beas (Vipas), Sutlej, dried Ghaggar/Saraswati. Rig Veda was composed here, on Punjabi rivers.
Taxila / Takshashila — residential university near Rawalpindi. Panini (Sanskrit grammar), Charaka, Jivaka, Chanakya/Kautilya all worked or studied there. Three religions coexisted (Hindu, Buddhist, probably Jain) per Nearchus/Arrian.
Battle of the Hydaspes (326 BCE) — Alexander snuck across the Jhelum at night during a storm. Porus fought from his elephant until his own elephants, panicked by Greek arrows, trampled his infantry. Porus’s son died first.
The Multanis wounded Alexander under the ribs while he was scaling their wall. He died of that wound three years later in Babylon.
Ashoka’s Maurya empire stretched Patna → Bamiyan → Kabul → Kandahar. Only peninsular South India was outside it. Punjab was Buddhist. Gandhara art (Greek-influenced Buddhas) is from this region.
Hindu Shahi dynasty ruled Punjab/Kashmir/UP/Haryana/KPK from ~730 AD. Built Salt Range temples. Three generations — Jaipal, Anandpal, Bhimpal — fought Mahmud of Ghazni. Jaipal performed Johar after defeat.
Etymology of dhāḍī: Punjabi cry of distress comes from dāḍhī (beard), the dust cloud kicked up by invading cavalry seen from village rooftops.
The identity claim: Pakistani Punjabis venerate conquerors (Sikandar, Mahmud, Abdali), name children after them, and forget defenders (Porus, Jaipal). They reject Punjabi as the language of peasants and chase Urdu/English. The “real” history begins in 712 AD with Bin Qasim — everything before is treated as someone else’s story.

Claude’s Take

This is one of those conversations that could easily slip into wistful where-did-it-all-go nostalgia, and to Rashid’s credit it mostly doesn’t. His instinct is to reach for primary sources — Arrian, Nearchus, the Rig Veda’s geography, David Reich’s genetics — rather than rhetoric. The Mehrgarh-bulldozer detail, the cuneiform tablets, the dhāḍī etymology, the genetic split between paternal and maternal lineage — these are the kind of concrete pegs that make the broader argument harder to wave off.

The argument itself is real. Pakistani textbooks famously start the country’s “history” in 712 AD. Indian textbooks aren’t innocent either, but the Pakistani version is the more dramatic erasure. Rashid is asking the obvious question — if the Rig Veda was composed on the Jhelum and Ravi, why is it filed under “their” past — and answering it as a civilisational identity problem, not a religious one.

Where the conversation drifts is when Rashid lapses into “we were so honest, so peaceful, so cultured” mode. The Taxila-was-fraud-free line is doing more work than it can carry. And the framing that pre-Islamic Punjab was a uniformly pluralistic paradise is a little too neat — Brahminical hierarchy did harden well before 712 AD; he himself notes it. But these are loose moments in an otherwise grounded conversation.

8/10 because it’s a serious primary-source survey of 10,000 years of Punjab, told without academic stiffness, by someone who walked the ground. The score would be 9 if Rashid resisted the occasional flourish about Punjabi character; would be 7 if the conversation were only about identity and not about history.

Porus, Alexander & Punjab's Identity Crisis | Salman Rashid x Jugnu Mohsin Ep #1 | O1A2G